The present invention relates to a smart card and to a method of operating the smart card in which the smart card has input/output means enabling the smart card to receive and transmit data regarding individual financial transactions.
Personal financial transactions can today be conducted using a wide variety of credit and debit cards. The transactions may be on-line or off-line retail purchases. Alternatively the transactions may be to withdraw cash or make financial transfers using automated teller machines or self service terminals. An even wider range of transactions has become commonplace through the advent of telephone banking whereby telephone or personal computer instructions to the relevant institution can be communicated for financial transfers and the purchase of services.
Many consumers using a wide variety of means to conduct financial transactions have no real visibility of their cashflow except from the printed receipts from machines such as point of sale (POS) terminals and automated teller machines and from monthly bank statements.
It is an aim of the present invention to provide such consumers with a more readily accessible view of cashflow.
According to the present invention there is now provided a smart card having input/output means enabling the smart card to receive and transmit data regarding individual financial transactions, a store for logging the transactions individually, and programming means to process the individual transactions so as to consolidate them into a consolidated log of transactions.
Further, according to the present invention, there is provided a method of operating a smart card having input/output means enabling the smart card to receive and transmit data regarding individual financial transactions, the method comprising logging the transactions individually and employing programming means within the smart card to process the individual transactions so as to consolidate them into a consolidated log of transactions.
The consolidated log can be accessed through the input/output means for display or printout under the control of the consumer using the smart card.